[Chris Wright]

well heck, sounds good, start a business on that!

[Chris Wright]

speedgrade has a 3 strip preset and 16mm had pretty large grain. are you adding tv scanlines? VHS quality is much lower. Like
420 lines. chroma damage? AE has color balance effect.

https://aescripts.com/bad-tv/

you can make your own with AE’s displacement map, fractal noise, Bad TV in your animation presets, math effect slice.

[Chris Wright]

I think you’re missing my point. Linear light is a completely different way to map the gamma curve. Linear, itself requires at LEAST 14bits/pixel to not create banding. It’s a math quantize thing. It’s why most people don’t use it. It’s used primarily in the log and float land for blending film with effects.

also, as a side note, Dolby Vision’s new color profile needs at least 12 bits due to pixels requiring enough data to store luminescence relative to color values. Its pretty neat stuff in white papers.

[Chris Wright]

if you render out a 8 bit codec, you’re going to have 8 bit quality in your final composite even in 32bpc. There’s just no data there.

Does it band in AE? import it back into AE and try grading. It will fall apart in linear, most likely.

Let us know if you have any luck with 16bit(trillions) or 32bpc(float) files.

[Chris Wright]

I read about this problem ages ago. It still isn’t fixed? Does it only affect 8 or 32bpc? try clamping it with level-clamp on before applying.

or try setting mercury Playback Engine to software

[Chris Wright]

reference a spot with your pixel or waveform monitor and shadow/highlight effect, keyframe the changes. That’s the best way I can think of at the moment, but your shadow/white balance/saturation/contrast might still be noticeable, thankfully shadow/highlight has a saturation/contrast slider as well. keyframe that too. plus white balance might change.

I did make an auto timelapse template that fixes every frame with shadows/white balance/saturation/contrast. It might help or at the very least, speed things up.
AE CS3
https://f1.creativecow.net/6154/auto-white-balance-cs3-and-up

[Chris Wright]

duplicate the layer, add a feathered mask, set transfer mode to soft light.
You might need more than 2 with different opacities and mask sizes.

[Chris Wright]

is this timelapse or the camera is stopped/started various times?

[Chris Wright]

if you really want to get specific:

NTSC (D1) is 720 x 486 defined by SMPTE group as D1 NTSC (ITU-R 601)

720×480 is for DVD’s and the DVC codec.

704 is implying non-square according to 10/11(standard 0.9) ratio conversion to 640 square pixels 640/480 = 4×3 (1.33 aspect ratio) or 853.33 size (704×1.2121) for 16/9 aspect in square pixels.

720×486 was the wrong par but Actual SMPTE RP 187-1995 format:
overscan once again takes 3 pixels from the top and bottom now leaving 480.

This is because the pixel aspect ratio is different from the production aperture.
The picture needed to be centered after the crop for a perfect pixel ratio, called the clean aperture. Why? because of overscan. And guess what happens when codecs ignore the overscan? your pixel aspect ratio goes awry!

quick tip:
for 16:9, width x PAR / height = 1.77, for 4:3, width x PAR / height = 1.33

[Chris Wright]

there’s a hybrid non-linear stretch method posted here.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1056501